Santa Barbara, CA - CSI Electric, a leader in highly technical electrical design and construction, has solved a critical IT dilemma with LogicMonitor’s award-winning data center monitoring software. Since deploying the SaaS-based solution in its Southern California data centers, the company has been able to make more informed purchase decisions and eliminate costly outages within its multi-vendor infrastructure, consisting of systems from NetApp, Citrix, Microsoft, VMware, SonicWALL, and Cisco.

For John Lockie, CSI Electric’s Director of IT, managing an infrastructure that had tripled in size within a few years became a real stumbling block. “After we had virtualized everything on the server side, added several SANs, and a bunch of switches that were spread across multiple sites, monitoring was impossible.”

Lockie tried various one-off monitoring solutions, but wasn’t able to get meaningful data. “We have a small IT staff that supports more than 200 employees, plus our infrastructure. We just didn’t have the resources in-house to figure out what data needed to be captured, how to capture it, and then how to put it in a graph that could be presented to management.”

Then several months ago, Lockie came across LogicMonitor’s SaaS-based monitoring solution and decided to give it a try. Setup was minimal and the payoff was immediate. Lockie notes, “With LogicMonitor, all the data passing through our firewall is now presented in a way that we can clearly decide how to scale our infrastructure. We knew we needed to scale before deploying LogicMonitor, but weren’t sure when, how, and where. Now it’s more of an exacting process. I can look at LogicMonitor’s graphs and definitively say we need to upgrade this circuit because we’re at 90% throughout the entire business day.”

Another area where CSI Electric needed help was in understanding utilization of their NetApp Filers. “Are we looking at equipment that’s going to last a few more years, or are we going to have to upgrade within 6 months? Prior to LogicMonitor, we had no idea. We tended to over-buy out of fear of not having enough. With LogicMonitor, we know immediately. I can take snapshot views and see our utilization from any time period.”

Veteran data center manager and LogicMonitor CEO, Steve Francis adds, “This is exactly the business scenario that LogicMonitor was designed for: small IT staffs being responsible for either a lot of people, or a lot of infrastructure. In today’s environment, IT departments don’t have the resources to dedicate someone just to monitoring. LogicMonitor functions like a virtual system administrator, providing all the dashboards, graphs, alerts and reports, without having to invest the hours of staff time that other systems require.”


About LogicMonitor:
Headquartered in Santa Barbara, California, LogicMonitor LLC was founded by a team of data center managers and technology experts dedicated to making data center monitoring simple. The company is a NetApp, VMware, and Citrix technology partner, and was the recent recipient of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards for delivering outstanding business value with a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution. LogicMonitor was also recognized as one of the top network monitoring solutions by TechRepublic, a leading online resource for IT professionals. For more info, visit www.logicmonitor.com

About CSI Electric:
Founded in 1990, CSI Electric is a leader in highly technical electrical design and construction for the public and private sector. With offices in Santa Fe Springs and Antelope Valley, CA, the company employs over 200 LEED AP, PMP, CPQ and RCDD Professionals, and IBEW Electricians. For more info, visit www.csielectric.com.


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